"The results are visible," says landscape architect Jennifer Bolstad of the effects of climate change on Miami. "Even if people say they don’t believe in climate change, they believe in an octopus in the middle of their street." This is one of the cheekier lines uttered in a new video series about the effects of rising sea levels on the South Florida city—it's also the one that perhaps most effectively captures the complex relationship between Miami, its people, and the direct effects of climate change on the city.

Turning the Tide in Miami, a multipart video series produced by the nonprofit Van Alen Institute in partnership with The New Yorker and the documentary filmmaker Merete Mueller, is ostensibly a film about rising sea levels in Miami and their effect on the city's future. In reality, though, like the fallout from serious climate change, the results are far more complex.

"What we wanted to do was to look at climate change through the lenses of ecology, economy, and equality," explained Van Alen's executive director David van der Leer at a screening of the series last week. Over the course of five episodes, Turning the Tide in Miami explores the city's adaptation to climate change, the cost of rising sea levels, the effect of climate change on gentrification, and the use of techniques ranging from smart landscaping to street art to stem the effects of climate change and to raise awareness of its very real effects.

Though the latter, to most interested in the subject, might seem like an unnecessary step, those involved in the video series revealed sobering anecdotes about ignorance of climate change and its effects among Miami locals. The city is, after all, part of a state that has banned the very term "climate change" in its Department of Environmental Protection.

So how do architects, designers, and activists working in Miami push through measures to design with that taboo term in mind? “You have to leverage—or hack—capitalism," proposes Walter Meyer, Bolstad's partner at Local Office Landscape Architecture (LOLA), which redesigned the Miracle Mile shopping area in Coral Gables to increase its resiliency to rising sea levels. "Capitalism, like water, follows the path of least resistance." As a result, he points out, "we actually see the most innovation coming out of the red states. In Florida you can’t talk about causation, but people want solutions."

Engaging Miami's real-estate elite, though an effective way to address sea-level changes in certain areas, is only one part of the puzzle shown in the series. One startlingly underdiscussed aspect of climate change is its effects on gentrification, especially in cities like Miami with wide economic gaps. "In Miami, low-income communities of color were forced to live the center of the city above sea level, and now that the seas are rising, that puts us in prime real estate," explains community organizer Valencia Gunder. In episode four, Gunder visits one of several urban farms in low-income Miami neighborhoods, where locals are endeavoring to reclaim space in their neighborhoods while at the same time creating green areas that will help neutralize carbon dioxide output.

In another episode, Linda Cheung, founder of Before It's Too Late, uses interactive murals brought to life through AR to engage locals who might be either apathetic or uninformed about the real, immediate effects of climate change on their areas. Cheung is also active in several school programs that challenge young students to conceptualize solutions to sea-level change.

Taken together, the series' various episodes illustrate the wide-reaching approach needed to truly stem the effects of climate change in a city like Miami. "A lot of it is taking these complex ideas and translating them so people can relate," Bolstad says. "That unlocks the potential to meaningfully involve those communities in making decisions in the face of the overwhelming vector or climate change."

As for the outsiders (visiting architects, designers, activists) looking to make changes, Bolstad warns that no matter how good their intentions, they must not forget to take their cues from the locals actually living this experience. "Architecture and landscape architecture was not traditionally taught as a listening profession," she notes. "And that’s a mistake in a time when the problems we have to solve are bigger than our own problems. We need to listen to the people who are at the front lines of these issues." Through "Turning the Tide in Miami," hopefully more people will get the chance to.

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